Mobile Home Owners Running Out of Options

Leo Plenski, a 62-year old Pinellas County retiree, has lived in the same mobile home park for 15 years. Recently, he received a six-month eviction notice, as the park will be closing in November to make way for new condo developments. He’s one of many Floridians, according to the Miami Herald, who face the hard reality of a competitive, shifting housing market.

“You got elderly people here that are really stressed out to the gills,” Plenski said. “We have heart attacks here on a daily basis. Where are you going to put these people? They’re elderly, they’re veterans, they’re on Social Security. I don’t know what we’re going to do with them.”

Plenski and thousands like him could eventually have nowhere to go as the state’s trailer parks close. With today’s prices, owners can make a killing selling to developers. Add in hurricanes and rising insurance costs, and the pressure on mobile-home residents to find another type of affordable housing is immense.

“We’re looking at tomorrow’s homeless,” said Jami Ross, a housing advocate for 1000 Friends of Florida, a non-profit organization. “I feel like we’re looking at a part of history. Decades from now, the mobile-home lifestyle will have disappeared.”

One problem, experts say, is that information about mobile-home owners is scarce — one researcher called it an informational black hole.

For instance, neither state agencies nor non-profit organizations serving mobile home owners can pinpoint how many such residents live in Florida. Estimates run anywhere from nearly 532,000 to 1.2 million. Census data in 2000 showed that 10 percent of Floridians live in manufactured housing, placing the number at about a million.

But Florida real estate analysts mostly rely on anecdotal evidence to paint a picture of the state’s manufactured home dwellers. Some are snowbirds, retirees who come to Florida and drop considerable savings into their mobile homes. Many are the working poor and the disabled, people who can’t afford to live anywhere else. Others are the elderly, on fixed incomes.

These residents face three major pressures, not the least of which is the threat of hurricanes. Last year’s storms, most notably Wilma, destroyed nearly 2,000 mobile homes across the Sunshine State. Residents living on fixed incomes can’t afford to make repairs, or even pay the hefty premiums for property insurance.

New building codes enacted after Hurricane Andrew in 1994 ensure that homes built today can withstand 100-mph winds, but there are 858,000 manufactured home units — or 74 percent of Florida’s existing inventory – built prior to the change. To make matters worse, insurance is becoming impossible to find and very expensive amidst the turmoil.

“I couldn’t find any coverage,” said Anthony Pinzone, who’s lived on a 211-acre mobile-home park in Sarasota County for the past decade. “It’s very expensive and extremely difficult to find. I was forced to go into Citizens.”

He refers to the state’s insurer of last resort, which doubled his premiums to about $600 a year.

The third obstacle is park closings. Nearly 70 mobile-home parks have shut down since 2003, out of about 5,825 parks. The remaining parks are going to disappear quickly if things don’t change, said Travis Moore, a lobbyist for the Alliance of Park Residents. As the rush to find undeveloped land in Florida continues, mobile-home parks will become the last frontier.

If mobile-home owners have to move, they can qualify for up to $3,000 in relocation assistance from the state. But not all manufactured housing is mobile, so some evicted residents who may have paid up to $100,000 lose their investment entirely. Even if they can afford to move, there may be nowhere left to go.

“Where are they going to go? People are not building more mobile-home parks,” said Dave Bruns, Florida’s AARP spokesman.

With the incredible surge in the housing market and rising Florida home loan rates making it even harder to buy homes, the state may be inundated with displaced residents in the next decade if measures are not enacted soon.